


wait for the dark

by Anonymous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Pre-Canon, Time Police
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2018-05-26 19:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6251791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eleven year old Tom Riddle wasn't quite ready for people popping in and out of thin air intent on killing him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wait for the dark

**Author's Note:**

> This is getting revamped, cleaned up and completed.

It was April, and the weather was nice enough that some of the children had been allowed to go out for a stroll, provided none of them wandered off. Tom, who went out in the streets all the time on his own regardless of whether he was supposed to or not, had just snorted quietly and nodded along with everyone else. For all of his various experiences running about in London, he rarely had adult permission to do so – it was more common to find him confined to his room under suspicion for some incident or the other. Once, memorably, he’d even been caught red-handed; but that had been a really long time ago.

He knew better now.

Of late, it had become common opinion that, in the months since his eleventh birthday, Tom Riddle had _changed_. All he did was read all day – his new fancy schoolbooks, not the same boring charity donations as before – and no more nastiness or mysterious incidents took place when he was around. Gone was the boy who’d once found himself with too little to do and too prone to restless, often vicious, moods; now young Tom was driven and focused and kept to himself, much to everybody’s relief.

Such behaviour was surely deserving of a reward, it was decided; and that was how Tom Riddle found himself on the wrong end of a wand on an early Tuesday afternoon in the spring of 1938.

At first sight the woman looked perfectly normal, if somewhat out of place. Her clothing was slightly odd – her heeled boots almost masculine in shape; her dress too large and flowing in some places, too tight on some others, generally too short and with too deep a neckline to be decent – but then again, this was London, and passers-by had generally better things to do with their time than fixating on some random woman’s clothes. Her hair was like fire, wild and fiery-red, and she was upon him within seconds of noticing his presence.

“Are you Tom Riddle?” she asked. It sounded too assertive to be a question, and yet there was something strangely hesitant about her voice. He stuck his chin out at her, looking up with a barely hidden frown.

“What’s it to you?”

She laughed. “Oh, boy. You have no idea.” Even her accent was odd, Tom noticed then, unlike anything else he’d ever heard, even on the radio.

“You’re eleven years old, aren’t you?” Again, it wasn’t truly a question. He nodded all the same, trying to figure out why a woman he had never seen before seemed to take such an interest in him. She was quite pretty and obviously well-groomed, her strange dress was of a much better quality than that of Tom’s clothes – of a better quality than Mrs. Cole’s clothes, truth be told – and she did not look at all like him.

“You know, I was the same age when I found it.” The woman continued, as if her reminiscences would somehow concern him. “The diary. Of course, you wouldn’t know.”

She flickered her right wrist a bit, and suddenly her fingers were curling around something – a familiar shape.

A wand. The woman was a _witch_ , and she wanted something to do with him.

And then his instinct kicked in. Before being the scariest boy at Wool’s Orphanage, Tom Riddle’d had his fill of being the smallest – the sullen kid, the freak, the one who read too much and spoke too fancy and quite simply did not fit him; he knew the rules of that particular game very well.

There was a reason why he’d learned to strike first, long before he’d realized he just plain liked being mean. But here he was lost – a few months past his eleventh birthday, widely ignorant of most magic beyond his first-year schoolbooks, green enough that he’d left his wand locked with the rest of his earthly possessions back in his room.

“I’m very sorry –” the woman began to say, then paused. “Actually, not very, to be honest. I wish… but it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just get this over with.”

She looked at him with that hesitant look and Tom – Tom did _his thing_ , that thing that’d got Michael and Sammy to leave him alone for good so many years ago, and scared the wits out of Amy after that one time she’d told on him even though he’d ordered her not to. The one that made people hurt.

Tom did his thing and the woman’s eyes closed for the briefest moment, and she winced.

Then her face relaxed a bit, mouth flexing into the most bitter smile Tom had ever seen, thinning lips stretched back in a mirthless grimace.

“Well,” she said. “I guess I should have expected that from you. Of course.”

She closed her eyes again, and Tom knew he should have run. But they were a bit off the track, and even though he could hear Sarah and the other children, he wouldn’t get there quick enough. The woman was a _witch_ ; she surely couldn’t be tricked so easily.

And he didn’t want to get hit in the back, running away.

The woman looked down at him and shook her head, then raised her wand arm. It seemed to happen very slowly; Tom had the time to look at her movement and wonder what she meant to do. Put him to sleep and carry him away? Get him to answer more strange questions? Hurt him for some reason? Maybe she knew his family. Maybe…

And then there was somebody standing in front of him, suddenly, where there hadn’t been anyone before.

“Gin,” the person said. It was a woman’s voice, clear and nervous. “Please stop.”

Tom took in the new scene in front of him. He could see the back of a woman – odd boots, men’s slacks, untucked shirt with a coloured pattern – and he could see what she was holding in her outstretched hand.

Another witch.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Tom jumped away from the protective shield of the woman’s body and hid himself behind the nearest patch of bushes – close enough to listen, with his belly on the ground so that he wouldn’t be seen. He immediately focused on making sure he wouldn’t be noticed, wishing with all himself that they would just ignore him, forget he’d ever been there…

“You know why I have to do it,” the first woman was saying. “You know what happens, and I just can’t –” She sounded close to tears, and Tom had to roll his eyes at how pathetic she was being.

“Ginny, you know I can’t let you do it,” the other woman retorted. Do what? When would they finally start spelling it out for him? “It would go against everything we –”

A deep sigh, loud enough that he could hear it all the way from his hiding place. “Look, just – let’s go back and pretend it never happened. We can sweep it under the carpet, us and Harry, and no one will ever have to know.”

Then he heard a bitter, bitter laugh. “Like it never happened,” she said. “Don’t we all want that?”

That was clearly a signal of some sort, because the next thing he heard was the familiar cracking of grass and leaves under someone’s shoes, words he’d never heard before and the almost inaudible _thump_ he’d come to associate with a spell hitting its target. He held his breath.

It went on for what felt like an eternity. His heart was beating loudly in his chest, annoyingly enough, and the muscles in his neck had begun to ache from the effort of keeping his head almost flat on the ground but still avoid eating leaves. After an insufferably long time, Tom risked rolling over to his side, and raising his gaze just a little bit –

The scene in front of him was nothing short of spectacular. The women looked as though they were dancing, flowing easily to one step to the other, hair flowing in the wind and coloured light shooting between their bodies. Their spells conjured _things_ – beans of light, columns of fire, sudden impossible transformation; and he wondered how it was possible that none of the Muggles in the park had seen anything.

This was real magic, Tom decided, nothing like the boring back-and-forth in the illustrations of his first-year duelling book. This was making wonders come true, ruling the elements, reorder the world according to one’s will. He stared, wide-eyed, as one of the trees sprouted roots and enveloped the red-haired woman, tightening around her arms and legs. She whispered something – she must have, although he hadn’t seen her lips move – and a long blade appeared in the air, cutting the wooden branches one by one.

It wasn’t enough. Just as the woman was about to be completely swaddled by the growing mass of wood, she disappeared into thin air with the loud sound of a gun opening fire.

Tom jumped, and rolled over again as quick as he could.

He willed to remain perfectly still for as long as he could stand it, one check scraping against the ground as he dub his fingers deeper and deeper under the grass roots, taking even breaths to calm himself down. Finally, when he was sure enough time had passed and he was composed again, Tom dared to walk out from behind the bushes.

Only to find himself unable to move, thin silvery ropes wrapped firmly around his ankles.

And, behind him, footsteps.

It was the second woman, the one who’d come to his defence – or had she? She came in closer, pacing around him, and it was so terribly unnerving not being able to move. Then she finally walked into his field of vision; and he frowned, staring intently at her face. She was… unlike what he would have expected, sweaty and dishevelled, her mass of hair falling in strands out of her messy braid. She was about as old as the other woman had been – barely enough to be considered an adult – and while she wasn’t quite as good-looking and nor as well put-together, her dark eyes were deep and enticing, dangerously intense.

“So, you’re Tom Riddle,” she said, almost puzzled, as if he were some curiosity she was trying to make sense of.

He didn’t bother replying to such an idiotic statement. “Is she dead?” he asked. He only got a vague look in response.

“The other woman,” Tom clarified. “The one with the red hair – she disappeared. Is she dead?”

The woman in front of him frowned. “Of course not. She left. And, well, do you think I would just kill someone like that?”

She sounded genuinely curious about his answer. He merely shrugged. “She was trying to kill me, though. Wasn’t she?”

Her lack of an answer was a good as one. Tom felt strangely lightheaded, and the world around him seemed to swirl somehow. He’d never seen that woman before and she was _magic_ – she was just like him. Why would any of his people want him dead? He looked up at the witch in front of him, searching for the right words.

“She – she’s not very well,” she said, eventually. “And she took it out on you for things someone else did. We’ll sort it out.”

By ‘we’, he doubted she meant to include Tom himself.

“Who’s ‘someone else’?” he asked. “And who are you, anyways?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Are you always this rude?”

“Was it my father?” Tom continued, suddenly intrigued. “The reason that woman attacked me? Does he look like me? I don’t look like my mother at all, and you said she’s crossed at me for something someone else did and, well, I don’t really know that many people.”

It should bother him, perhaps, that he might have a father who’d upset someone to the point of seeking revenge by killing a child; but in Tom’s books, everything was better than anonymity. He didn’t want to entertain the idea that his father might have been the same kind of weak nullity as his mother. “Is my father magic, too? Is he alive?”

The woman looked very surprised by his line of inquiry. “I really can’t tell you anything more than that, Tom,” she said with the same patronizing tone he hated so much when coming from the orphanage workers. “But I can tell you that I’m with the government. The wizarding government, that is.”

It was clearly an attempt to distract him, but it worked. It more than worked in fact; it made him nervous. “Are you going to make me forget?” he asked. He’d read that was what the Ministry did when Muggles saw something they weren’t supposed to, and Tom clearly hadn’t been supposed to see what had just happened. “That’d be very stupid,” he told the woman. “What if that woman comes back?”

She stared at him, and he stared back. Inside, he was trembling, but he didn’t dare let his show on his face. Tom hated not knowing things, hated things that weren’t under his control, and hated the thought of someone messing with his mind even more.

Finally, she seemed to come to a conclusion.

“I really hate it that you’re not wrong,” she said, eventually. Tom shrugged; he supposed it might be annoying for this woman to have to agree with a child. That was something he was used to.

“But you’re to keep this to yourself.” Her voice turned low and stern, a warning if he’d ever heard one. “If you tell anyone, Tom Riddle, and I mean _anyone at all_ , about what you saw here today, I’ll seek you out and personally scourge the memory out of your brain.”

He shivered at bit at her words. She looked perfectly calm saying this, and there was no doubt in Tom’s mind that she would go through with it. That automatically made her the most interesting magical person he’d ever met, leagues ahead of the barmy fools in Diagon Alley and that self-righteous lunatic of a Transfiguration Professor. Tom meet her gaze firmly, making his best to look defiant and self-assured.

“Absolutely,” he drawled. “Because there are so many people I could tell.”

She did not look impressed at all; in fact, she laughed. “God, kid, you’re such a fucking piece of work.”

He was startled, by her invocation as much as by her casual swearing. Wizards didn’t believe in deities like Muggles did, and ladies most certainly did not curse like she had just done. Tom found that he wanted to know more about her, very much so, and he opened his mouth to speak – and then the woman waved her wand and the ropes holding him disappeared, vanishing as if they’d never been there.

“How did you do that?” he asked, eyes narrowing. “You didn’t even have to speak. And the ropes, what sort of incantation’s that?”

She smiled at him, or something close to it. “Standard Book of Spells, Grade Six,” it was all she said; and then she took a step back and was gone, the snap of her disappearance almost deafening in the quiet loneliness of the evening.

By the time he made it back to Wool’s he was two hours late and everyone had noticed him missing; and Tom Riddle got locked up in the attic for almost two days and wasn’t allowed to go out the park for the rest of the spring and the entire summer, until it was time for him to go off to his new school.

By then, he’d almost managed to forget about the incident.


End file.
